OpenTelemetry Demo Stack

This project provides a ready-to-run observability sandbox with the OpenTelemetry Collector, example telemetry generators, and popular backends (Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana). It lets you explore traces, metrics, and logs end-to-end with minimal setup.

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What’s Inside

• OpenTelemetry Collector (Contrib) Receives OTLP telemetry and exports to Jaeger, Prometheus, and console.

• Telemetry Generators Containers that continuously emit example traces, metrics, and logs.

• Jaeger (all-in-one) UI for exploring distributed traces.

• Prometheus Scrapes Collector metrics and pipeline outputs.

• Grafana Visualizes Prometheus data with dashboards.

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Project Structure

📂
├── 📄docker-compose.yml          # Stack definition
├── 📄otel-collector-config.yaml  # Collector pipeline config
└── 📄prometheus.yml              # Prometheus scrape targets

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Usage

1. Start the stack

docker-compose up -d

2. Check container status

docker ps -a

3. Stop everything

docker-compose down

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Access the UIs

• Jaeger UI (Traces): http://localhost:16686 Search for service names like sample-tracegen.

• Prometheus (Metrics DB): http://localhost:9090

• Grafana (Dashboards): http://localhost:3000 Login: admin / admin

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OTLP Endpoints

Your own apps can send telemetry directly to the Collector:

• gRPC: localhost:4317
• HTTP: http://localhost:4318

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Configuration Notes

• Collector Exporters

  • otlp/jaeger: sends traces to Jaeger’s OTLP port
  • prometheus: exposes metrics on :8889
  • debug: prints all data to container logs

• Telemetrygen Flags

  • --duration=inf: run indefinitely
  • --rate=N: items per second
  • For logs you must set --duration (or --logs count), otherwise it exits immediately.

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Troubleshooting

• Collector exited → Check docker logs otel-collector. Often caused by invalid exporter config.
• Telemetrygen logs restart → Ensure --duration=inf or --logs > 0 is set.
• No traces in Jaeger → Confirm traces pipeline exporter is otlp/jaeger and the container can reach jaeger:4317.
• No metrics in Prometheus → Check Prometheus targets at http://localhost:9090/targets.

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References

• OpenTelemetry Collector
• Telemetrygen
• Jaeger
• Prometheus
• Grafana

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